Better Off_ Flipping the Switch on Technology - Eric Brende [26]
Others around us, with all their knowledge and experience, had long ago discarded the practice. Many of our Minimite neighbors had rams. Those who didn’t used gravity-fed spring water or pitcher pumps right at the kitchen sink. When Mr. Miller’s married daughter saw Mary at our outdoor pump, she couldn’t contain her bemusement. “How old-fashioned!” she exclaimed. Even the Minimites thought us behind the times.
Why not go with the flow?
I was weeding a flower bed in the side yard when I heard a ruckus. I wheeled around in time to see a flatbed wagon led by a pair of galloping horses careening down the highway in front of our house. Two figures stood atop it—Nate Jones and one of his sons. The wagon lurched this way and that and finally landed in the ditch.
I raced to the spot and found Nate and Perry dusting grass and dirt off their clothing, apparently unharmed. The horses were also okay. But the wagon was a sight. The wooden tongue had broken off. Nate had no choice but to abandon the vehicle and lead the horses home on foot.
But what had gone wrong? I knew that, to save money, Nate had put the wagon together from used materials, as he had his house. Now he told me he had never installed brakes. “Why’d I need brakes, I thought”—he said—“when I can just pull on the reins?” He’d just discovered the answer. As the wagon began to go downhill, the pressure on the horses’ harness straps built from behind, pushing them forward. As they moved faster, momentum increased, heightening the pressure, and the problem snowballed. Eventually, barely able to keep ahead of the wagon, the horses panicked and broke into a run.
“If you’re a beginner on the homestead,” Nate bawled, “ya’ take two steps backward for every three steps forward. Or maybe it’s more like seven backward and eight forward. You’ve just got to learn patience.”
The mishap gave me pause. Could the ratio of progress to regress be as low as Nate claimed? Was it inevitable that I would backslide as he did? We had made that mistake with the weeding, I knew. But this matter was different; it was a question of technology. Nate had violated a principle that I had only lately come to grasp: that too little of it is no better than too much. Maybe the beginner’s error lay in viewing technology as evil in itself, overcompensating for technological tyranny with technological abstinence. If so, I was one step ahead of the game. We were about to get running water.
Amos dropped by again and asked if we wanted to see the spring. I didn’t hesitate a moment. “How do we get there?” I asked.
“If you want, we could take your car,” he said.
I had, of course, deemed car travel strictly off-limits except when its use was clearly justified, and even this was a temporary concession made in lieu of alternative long-term arrangements. And yet it seemed boorish to deny Amos’s good-natured request. Why be uptight about a little technology? Impulsively, I reached for the keys. (At last something to show to him. A mere return of favors, no? A technological reciprocation.) To my gratification Amos’s eyes bugged out. To an unworldly Minimite boy, the interior of the Escort must have looked like the cockpit of a flying saucer. I scanned the fields in case Mr. Miller was watching. The coast was clear.
We chugged up a long open hill beside a barbed wire fence. At the top, I slowed near a clump of trees. Turning to look behind us, we beheld a tiny white cottage with a diminutive garden and threadlike rows of vegetables. The oak in the front yard looked disproportionately large and dwarfed the house underneath. Carpetlike pastures and tracts of tillage rolled together in a wavy quilt for miles in all directions. All creation